Affiliated Faculty

By leveraging and integrating capabilities from all nine colleges along with the many relevant research centers and institutes at Northeastern University, the Global Resilience Institute has established resilience as a university-wide focus. All nine college deans have committed to making resilience an ongoing research and educational priority within their colleges.

David DeSteno

Professor of Psychology

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. At the broadest level, his work examines the mechanisms of the mind that shape vice and virtue. Studying hypocrisy and compassion, pride and punishment, cheating and trust, his work continually reveals that human moral behavior is much more variable than most would predict.

David is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, for which he serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion. His work has been repeatedly funded by the National Science Foundation and has been regularly featured in the media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Radiolab and Talk of the Nation, and USA Today.

He is the author of The Truth About Trustand co-author of The Wall Street Journal spotlight psychology bestseller Out of Character. He has written about his research for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review,Pacific Standard, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic.

Abhi Shelat

Abhi Shelat joins Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science after serving as an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s computer science department.

Abhi grew up in Austin, Texas, where his father worked after earning his MBA from Northeastern in May of 1975. Abhi is very happy to join his father’s alma matter this Fall. Abhi earned a BA from Harvard in 1997, before moving to San Francisco to work at a startup. He earned his PhD in cryptography from MIT in 2005 and joined the Zurich IBM Research Lab shortly after. Abhi then joined the computer science department at the University of Virginia in 2007. He was promoted and tenured from an assistant professor to an associate professor in 2013.

Abhi has received the NSF CAREER award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award, the FEST fellowship award, an Amazon Research award, an SAIC research award, a Jacobs Future of Money Workshop research prize, the Google Faculty Research Award, and an ACM UVA-chapter Professor of the Year award. Abhi is also co-founder of a software company, Arqspin, in Charlottesville that now operates itself.

His research interests lie in cryptography and applied security. Abhi works on secure computation protocols, which are methods for mutually distrusting parties, each with private inputs, to jointly compute a function while ensuring maximal privacy and correctness.

Abhi has three energetic children with his partner and acclaimed architectural historian, Cammy Brothers (also joining Northeastern).

Jane Amidon

Professor of Landscape Architecture

Director of the Urban Landscape Program

Jane Amidon is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Urban Landscape Program in the Northeastern University School of Architecture. Jane teaches studio, lecture and seminar courses focused on the ideas, histories and design strategies of changing cities.

Jane has lectured and published extensively on contemporary urban landscape and the related topics of modernism and modernization of the American landscape. Recent publications include “Big Nature,” in Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design (Blostein and Tilder, eds) and “Eclogue for the Metropolis,” in PRAXIS Journal. Published books include Radical Landscapes: Reinventing Outdoor Space and monographs on Kathryn Gustafson and Dan Kiley. She was the founding editor for the Source Books in Landscape Architecture series and published the first four books of that series. She co-organized three Landscape Complexity and Transformation conferences in collaboration with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, and continues to lecture at universities and institutions internationally.

Dan Adams

Associate Professor of Architecture

Interim Director, School of Architecture

Dan Adams is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Northeastern University. Dan teaches design studios and seminars, in both the architecture and sustainable urban environments programs. These courses focus on negotiating architectural design with environmental context, with specific focus on integrating infrastructural systems in cities. Dan coordinates the fourth-year undergraduate urbanism studio for both architecture and landscape architecture students. This studio investigates the design of urban frameworks for integrating landscape and infrastructure systems into multiple scales of the built environment, from region scale networks to the architectural detail.

Dan is also the co-founder of Landing Studio. Landing Studio is a design and planning practice that develops tactics for positively integrating global and region scale infrastructure into local urban contexts. Much of the work focuses on developing design tactics as well as spatial and policy frameworks that allow for the interweaving of public engagement and improved environmental performance within typically inaccessible industrial and infrastructural landscape. Since 2005, Landing Studio has worked on projects with port facilities and highway viaducts in and around Boston and New York through the design of headquarters buildings, port infrastructure, demolition plans, shared industrial/public park landscapes, light installations, festivals, museum exhibitions, and industrial/community operations agreements. Recent recognitions of Landing Studio’s work include a 2017 National AIA Regional & Urban Design Award, 2016 Excellence on the Waterfront Honor Award, 2015 Architectural League Prize.

Dan has a BSArch from the University of Michigan, and an MArch from Harvard University, where he received the AIA Medal, and Kelly Thesis Prize, as well as the Druker Research Fellowship; for ongoing research studying global production and transport of salt and the unique integration of these industrial landscapes with urban communities and ecology.

Sharon Harlan

Professor of Health Sciences and Sociology

Sharon L. Harlan is Professor of Health Sciences and Sociology at Northeastern University. Dr. Harlan’s research explores the human impacts of climate change that are dependent upon people’s positions in social hierarchies, places in built environments of unequal quality, and policies that improve or impede human adaptive capabilities.

Focusing on excessive heat as a significant and increasingly critical threat to human health and well-being in cities, she studies urban landscapes that produce unequal risks for people in neighborhoods divided by social class and race/ethnicity. She has led multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research and community engagement projects that integrate social theories about the historical production of environmental injustices with data and models from the ecological, geospatial, and health sciences.

Her work on coupled natural and human systems has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation on urban vulnerability to climate change, sustainability and social equity in urban water systems, the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, and metropolitan area surveys on environmental attitudes and behaviors. She has served as an advisor on climate justice and social vulnerability to organizations such as the American Sociological Association, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Social Science Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program.

Dr. Harlan earned a BA in Sociology at Northeastern University and a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University.

Michelle Laboy

Assistant Professor, School of Architecture

Faculty Affiliate in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Michelle Laboy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, with an Affiliate appointment in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Her research and teaching explore interdisciplinary design approaches to engage architecture in the creation of a sustainable and resilient urban landscape, with a particular focus on how buildings’ site and structural strategies enable adaptation to changing climatological, ecological and cultural environments.

Michelle’s design research received grants from Autodesk and the Boston Groundwater Trust to design systems to visualize the varying water table in the city of Boston and the effects of localized recharge strategies in individual building sites in the last decade. As draw-down of groundwater in the urban environment threatens wood foundations of historic buildings, and low stormwater retention in building sites increases the vulnerabilities to urban coastal and riverine ecologies, her work will make the real-time monitoring of groundwater in public space a valuable tool to evaluate impacts and engage the public in implementing solutions. Michelle is Co-PI on a current project titled Future-Use Architecture: Design for Persistent Change, which received the 2017 Latrobe Prize of the AIA College of Fellows. She is part of an interdisciplinary team developing a tool that makes information on sustainability and resilience of the existing urban fabric accessible to homeowners and tenants, funded by the AIA Upjohn Research Initiative. Her recent scholarship has been published in The Plan Journal, Enquiry: the ARCC Journal, and the Journal of Architectural Education.

Michelle has Master degrees in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of Michigan; and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico. She co-founded FieLDworkshop, a research-based design practice in Boston, to explore how smaller scale design contributes to conditions of urban resilience and sustainability at larger scales. Prior to coming to Northeastern, Michelle worked as a licensed engineer and architectural designer in San Juan, Detroit, Barcelona, Chicago and Cambridge. Her professional experience includes transportation and urban design, building design for commercial, educational and residential projects, and water-sensing installations in public space.

Peter Wiederspahn

Associate Professor, School of Architecture

Peter Wiederspahn is an associate professor at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. His research and pedagogical focus is architectural design, building technologies, and design research entrepreneurship. He was the Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs for the Northeastern College of Arts, Media and Design, and intermittently the Interim Director of the School of Architecture. Additionally, he was the inaugural Director of the School of Architecture Berlin Semester Abroad. He has also held teaching positions at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the Pennsylvania State University. Professor Wiederspahn earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and his Master of Architecture from the Harvard University.

Professor Wiederspahn is a co-PI for the 2017 FAIA Latrobe Prize, he has been awarded a Graham Foundation grant for his research entitled, “Wood Frame Multi-Family Housing in Boston, 1865-1900,” and has received a design research grant from the Boston Society of Architect for “Smart Growth Planning Prototypes.” Through his research and pedagogy, he has collaborated with the Northeastern College of Engineering and the College of Business Administration on student capstone projects for designing and producing business plans for prefabricated component construction systems.

Professor Wiederspahn is also the principal of Wiederspahn Architecture, LLC. His architectural practice has produced residential, multi-family, commercial and interior projects in Boston, New York and Chicago, and has received numerous design excellence awards.

Jennifer Bowen

Associate Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences

My work runs the gamut from understanding how human derived nutrients are altering the structure and function of salt marshes to examining whether oyster aquaculture increases the prevalence of both beneficial and harmful microorganisms in the environment. At the broadest levels, I am interested in how human activities are altering the structure and function of microbial communities and in turn how microbial communities can help ameliorate pollution from human sources.

The Boston area provides a great location for understanding how urban ecosystems influence biogeochemical cycling and the microbes that are responsible for those processes. Currently funded projects in my lab include 1) a long-term nutrient enrichment experiment at the Plum Island Long-Term Ecological Research site in Northern Massachusetts that aims to understand how coastal eutrophication will affect the sustainability of salt marsh ecosystems, and 2) Understanding how marsh restorations, including the Rumney Marsh, in Revere, MA, alter the capacity of marshes to remove land-derived nitrogen. We also have new projects that we are starting examining different aspects of plant – microbe and animal – microbe interactions, including how the invasive reed Phragmites australis alters microbial community structure compared to native lineages and how antibiotic treatment affects the microbiome of the Kemps Ridley sea turtle using a variety of cutting edge tools from molecular biology and biogeochemistry.

Thomas Vicino

Chair, Department of Political Science

Associate Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Professor Thomas J. Vicino is associate professor of political science, public policy and urban affairs. In 2014, Prof. Vicino was a U.S. Fulbright Core Scholar to Brazil, where he was a visiting associate professor of political economy in the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at Pontificia Universidade Catolica (PUC Minas) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He teaches at the graduate level in the MPA Program and the Master of Urban and Regional Policy (MURP) Program. At the undergraduate level, he teaches in the political science major and the urban studies minor. Prof. Vicino proudly serves as the faculty advisor to two student organizations: College Democrats and Huskies for Alternative Transportation.

Prof. Vicino specializes in the political economy of cities and suburbs, focusing on issues of metropolitan development, housing, and demographic analysis. He is the author of four books, including: Suburban Crossroads: The Fight for Local Control of Immigration Policy (2013) and Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore (2008) and co-author of Global Migration: The Basics (2014) as well as the bestselling book Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the US (2010). He has also published numerous book chapters and research articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Mehrdad Sasani

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Mehrdad Sasani is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and his MS in Structural Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic. His research and scholarship interests include: the progressive collapse of structures; earthquake engineering; and structural integrity and reliability.

Amy Mueller

Dr. Mueller is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Marine & Environmental Sciences. Work in the Environmental Sensors Lab builds on Dr. Mueller’s prior research at MIT’s Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering and the University of Washington’s Department of Oceanography.

Brian Helmuth

Professor - Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences & School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

My research explores the effects of climate and climate change on the physiology and ecology of marine organisms. Specifically, I use thermal engineering techniques, including a combination of field work, remote sensing and mathematical modeling, to explore the ways in which the environment determines the body temperatures of coastal marine animals such as mussels and seastars. Combined with energetics models, this approach provides a quantitative method of mapping patterns of growth, reproduction, and survival in economically and ecologically important coastal species. A major goal of this approach (funded by NASA and NSF) is to inform decision makers with scientifically accurate and useful forecasts. While much of my work has focused on North American rocky intertidal ecosystems, my lab also collaborates with researchers in:

Our work has shown some surprising results, and has suggested that our expectations of where to look for the effects of climate change in nature can be more complex than previously anticipated. For example, our research has shown that along the Pacific coast of the U.S., animal temperatures at sites in Oregon and Washington can be as hot or hotter than sites much farther to the south in California, due to the complex interaction of climate and tides in the region. As a result, we should not necessarily expect to see mortality at the southern ends of species range boundaries, but also at these hot spots. This complexity suggests that unless we know where and when to look for impacts of climate change, many early impacts could go unnoticed.

He is the author of No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action, and Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement, and co-editor of Social Movements in Health, and Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science and Health Social Movements. He studies biomonitoring and household exposure and reporting back data to participants in collaboration with Silent Spring Institute, social policy concerning flame retardants and perfluorinated compounds, and health social movements. He directs an NIEHS T-32 training program, “Transdisciplinary Training at the Intersection of Environmental Health and Social Science.” He heads the Community Outreach and Translation Core of Northeastern’s Children’s Environmental Health Center (Center for Research on Early Childhood Exposure and Development in Puerto Rico/CRECE) and both the Research Translation Core and Community Engagement Core of Northeastern’s Superfund Research Program (Puerto Rico Testsite to Explore Contamination Threats (PROTECT).

He is on the National Advisory Environmental Health Science Council, which advises the director of NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Anthony Braga

Distinguished Professor and Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Anthony A. Braga is a distinguished professor and director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice effective July 1, 2016. Braga’s record combines deep engagement in Boston and an international reputation as a leading researcher on crime prevention. He collaborates with criminal justice, social service, and community-based organizations to produce high impact scholarship, randomized field experiments, and policy advice on the prevention of crime at problem places, the control of gang violence, and reductions in access to firearms by criminals. With colleagues, Braga has published numerous peer reviewed journal articles in top criminology and criminal justice journals such as Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. Braga has authored three books and edited seven volumes with top scholarly presses such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Braga has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects totaling more than $11 million dollars in external funding from a variety of federal, state, and private grant-making institutions including the U.S. National Institute of Justice, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation. He is currently serving as a committee member for the National Research Council Committee on Proactive Policing – Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties and the Science Advisory Board to the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Braga is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). He is also a past president and fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology (AEC), and the 2014 recipient of its Joan McCord Award recognizing his commitment to randomized controlled experiments.

The practical value of his work in violence reduction in disadvantaged neighborhoods has been recognized by a numerous awards, including the Civic Leadership Award (2004) presented by The Boston Foundation, the United States Attorney General’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Community Partnerships for Public Safety (2009), and the U.S. Department of Justice Project Safe Neighborhoods Research Partner of the Year Award (2010). Between 2007 and 2013, Braga served as Chief Policy Advisor to former Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis and worked with his command staff and line-level officers on award-winning community policing and crime prevention initiatives. Braga holds an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Rutgers University.

Christopher Bosso

Professor of Public Policy

Director, Master of Public Policy and Master of Public Administration Programs

Christopher Bosso is professor of public policy at Northeastern University. His areas of interest include food and environmental policy, science and technology policy, and the governance of emerging technologies. His newest books are Framing the Farm Bill: Interests, Ideology, and the Agricultural Act of 2014 (University of Kansas Press, 2017) and, as editor, Feeding Cities: Improving Local Food Access, Sustainability, and Resilience (Routledge, 2017).

His 2005 book, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway, received the 2006 Caldwell Award for best book in environmental policy and politics from the American Political Science Association. He is also coordinator of the Consortium on Food Systems Sustainability, Health and Equity, as well as advisor to students in the accompanying undergraduate minor.

Geoffrey Trussell

Vice President, Nahant Campus Operations

Director, Coastal Sustainability Institute

Professor and Chair, Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences

Dr. Trussell received his PhD from the College of William and Mary and completed his postdoctoral studies at Brown University before joining the faculty of Northeastern. He is presently Professor and Chair of the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Marine Science Center. In 2012 Dr. Trussell developed the white paper that led to the creation the Urban Coastal Sustainability Initiative (UCSI). The overarching goal of UCSI is to create an interdisciplinary research hub that leverages existing strengths in ocean science, engineering and policy to respond to the major environmental threats facing the world’s coastal marine habitats, particularly those located in urban centers, as well as both social and technical tools and strategies necessary to overcome these threats. UCSI is now producing innovative solutions that create cleaner, safer, and smarter coastal communities. The success of this initiative has paved the way for UCSI to evolve into the Northeastern Institute for Coastal Sustainability.

Dr. Trussell’s research program focuses on a number of issues related to coastal sustainability and the evolutionary and community ecology of natural ecosystems. Since arriving at Northeastern he has served at the lead PI or Co-PI on grants totaling $6.1M and has published over 65 papers and book chapters. During his research career he has gone to a depth of 2.5 miles on the East Pacific Rise in the Alvin Deep Submergence Vehicle and lived for 10 days underwater in the Aquarius Undersea Research Habitat, 11 miles offshore in the Florida Keys.

Glenn Pierce

Director of the Institute for Security and Public Policy

Principal Research Scientist for the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Glenn Pierce, Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute for Security and Public Policy (ISPP) and a Principal Research Scientist for the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University. At Northeastern University he has also served as Director of Strategic Planning and Research for Information Services, Director of Academic Computing, and Director for the Center Applied Social Research.

As Director of Academic Computing he was one of the leaders in planning and implementing Northeastern University’s institution-wide computer network, the development of a centralized computer support services, and the university-wide delivery of software applications and other network services. Dr. Pierce has conducted research on a broad range of social and economic issues and has obtained funding for his research from a variety of agencies including the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology program.

His most recent research has focused on firearms violence, counter proliferation of dual use technologies and weapons of mass destruction, criminal justice information and intelligence systems, and intergroup conflict.

Joan Fitzgerald

Professor, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Joan Fitzgerald focuses on urban climate governance and the connections between urban sustainability and economic development and innovation in European and North American Cities. She is working on her fourth book, Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018). Her third book, Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), examines how cities are creating economic development opportunities in several green sectors and discusses the state and national policy needed to support these efforts. Fitzgerald has published in academic journals such as Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, Local Environment, Economic Development Quarterly, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Urban Affairs, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and the political quarterly, The American Prospect.

Her courses include Cities, Sustainability and Climate Change and Urban Revitalization at the graduate level, and an undergraduate course, Introduction to Law, Policy and Society. Before coming to Northeastern University, Joan taught urban planning and policy at the New School University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University.

David Fannon

Assistant Professor

David Fannon is an architect and building scientist whose work integrates research, analysis, and design to provide occupant comfort and wellbeing in long-lasting, low-resource consuming buildings. He holds a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

David has held positions at international engineering, architecture, A/E and specialty consulting firms, where he contributed to a range of new construction, renovation and historic restoration projects for government, higher-education and commercial clients. He has conducted research in academic and professional settings, consulted on strategic planning and change management and performed simulation and analysis for a range of high-performance buildings.

David earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Masters from University of California Berkeley, and is a registered architect in the State of New York. He is a member of ASHRAE and a LEED Accredited Professional with a Building Design and Construction specialty

Matthew Eckelman

Assistant Professor

Matthew Eckelman is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a secondary appointment in Chemical Engineering. His research & scholarship interests include: Environmental engineering and sustainability; life cycle assessment; energy efficiency and emissions modeling; environmental assessment of bio and nanomaterials; material and energy use in urban buildings and infrastructure.

Dr. Eckelman holds a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Amherst College and a doctorate in Environmental Engineering from Yale University

Shalanda Baker

Professor of Law, Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Professor Baker works closely with colleagues in the Northeastern's Global Resilience Institute, linking it to the School of Law's new Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC). She teaches courses at the law school and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities related to her research interests in environmental law and energy law.

Professor Baker served as an Air Force officer prior to her honorable discharge under the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, and became a vocal advocate for repeal of the policy. Following her graduation from law school, Baker clerked for Justice Roderick Ireland of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She also worked as a corporate and project finance associate for Bingham McCutchen LLP, initially in Boston and later in Japan. Professor Baker also completed a William H. Hastie Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she also received her LLM degree. In 2016, she won a Fulbright award and spent a year in Mexcio exploring energy reform, climate change and indigenous rights.

Before joining Northeastern's faculty, Professor Baker spent three years as an associate professor of law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i, where she was the founding director of the Energy Justice Program. Prior to that, she served on the faculty at University of San Francisco School of Law.

Serena Parekh

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Serena Parekh is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program and editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and continental philosophy. Her most recent book, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement, was published with Routledge in 2017. Her first book, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights, was published in 2008 and translated into Chinese. She has also published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Human Rights Quarterly.

Matt Nisbet

Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University

Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. is Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Environmental Communication; a Senior Editor at ORE Climate Science; and a consulting communication researcher to the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.

Nisbet holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Communication from Cornell University and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College. Nisbet studies the role of communication, journalism, and advocacy in shaping debates over complex policy issues such as climate change, income inequality, or gene editing. He is the author or co-author of more than 75 peer-reviewed studies, scholarly book chapters, and reports including the recent U.S. National Academies consensus study on Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda.

With his co-author Declan Fahy, he is currently writing a book with Harvard University Press that examines the influence of a special generation of public intellectuals who have helped define the major scientific and social issues of our time. By evaluating the careers of writers like Bill McKibben, David Brooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Susan Faludi, Michael Pollan, Fareed Zakaria, Malcolm Gladwell, and Naomi Klein, the book explores the power of ideas and narratives to influence public opinion, inspire social movements, and alter political decisions. In other current projects, Nisbet is analyzing the role of strategic philanthropy in supporting actions to address climate change; evaluating sources of financial support for non-profit journalism; studying the impact of income inequality on public reservations about science and technology; and evaluating strategies for promoting thoughtful dialogue about science and religion.

Among awards and recognition, he has been a Visiting Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, a Health Policy Investigator at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a Google Science Communication Fellow. Nisbet serves on the editorial boards for Public Understanding of Science and the International Journal of Press/Politics, and on the Board of Directors for the International Environmental Communication Association. He is an affiliated researcher with the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

Carmen Sceppa

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Professor of Health Sciences, Bouve College of Health Sciences

Dr. Sceppa’s program of research addresses three main areas of aging and health promotion. These include: (1) assessing the efficacy of nutrition and physical activity/exercise interventions on chronic disease risk factors and health outcomes; (2) translating evidence based lifestyle interventions into ‘real world’ settings; and (3) developing sustainable strategies to promote health and reduce the burden of chronic diseases.

Dr. Sceppa’s translational research contributes to our understanding of the role of exercise, physical activity, and healthy foods to counteract physical and psychosocial stressors associated with the onset of chronic conditions and disability in older adults (including the spectrum from acquisition of risk factors and pathology, impairment and functional limitations, to disease, disability, and poor quality of life). Dr. Sceppa’s multidisciplinary research helps develop, evaluate and disseminate effective lifestyle health promotion interventions that contribute to managing and promoting the health of underserved communities and populations. Dr. Sceppa is an active member of the American Society for Nutrition, the Gerontological Society of America, and the American College of Sports Medicine.

Alisa Lincoln

Professor of Health Sciences and Sociology

Director, Institute of Urban Health Research and Practice

Dr. Alisa K. Lincoln joined the IUHRP as an Associate Director, where she oversees the development of a Mental Health Research Program. She has been actively involved in conducting public mental health research for more than a decade and has received more than four million dollars in federal research funds.

Dr. Lincoln completed an NIMH pre-doctoral Fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology, and was an NIMH-funded Public Academic Liaison (PAL) Fellow through the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) training grant. Her training in Mental Health Services Research continued with the “Mentoring for Mental Health Services Research” NIMH R25. Dr. Lincoln’s research contributes to our knowledge about disparities in mental health and mental health care and focuses on the ways in which social factors and system level factors inter-relate to perpetuate these disparities.

Tina Eliassi-Rad

Associate Professor

Tina Eliassi-Rad is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She is also on the faculty of Northeastern's Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (with a minor in Mathematical Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning; and spans theory, algorithms, and applications of massive data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. Tina's work has been applied to personalized search on the World-Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, and cyber situational awareness. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by the government and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics) as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project). In 2010, she received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. For more details, visit http://eliassi.org.

Suzanna Walters

Professor of Sociology

Professor and Director, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Dr. Suzanna Danuta Walters’ work centers on questions of gender, feminist theory and politics, sexuality, and popular culture and she is a frequent commentator on these issues for the media. Her most recent book, The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality (NYU Press), explores how notions of tolerance limit the possibilities for real liberation and deep social belonging. This book has been the subject of numerous radio and press interviews and discussions, which can be heard and read on her website www.suzannawalters.com. Walters’ previous book, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (University of Chicago Press, 2001), examined the explosion of gay visibility in culture and politics over the past 15 years and raised pressing questions concerning the politics of visibility around sexual identity. The book was a finalist for several literary awards (including the Lambda Literary Award). Her other works include books on feminist cultural theory (Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory), mothers and daughters in popular culture (Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture) and numerous articles and book chapters on feminist theory, queer theory and LGBT studies, and popular culture. She is currently working on a book examining the state of both feminist theory and politics in an era of “call-out feminism” and intense social media attention.

Walters also contributes regularly to more public venues and has written for The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun, among others. In 2004, Walters founded the first in the nation Ph.D. program in gender studies at Indiana University, where she was a professor of gender studies and held positions in sociology and communication and culture.

Previously, Walters was professor of sociology and director of women’s studies at Georgetown University. She was also a visiting senior scholar at the Center for Narrative Research at the University of East London. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Qi (Ryan) Wang

Assistant Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Associate Director of Research on Social Media at Boston Area Research Initiative

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University and the Associate Research Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), Harvard University. I study the interplay between urban informatics and urban, infrastructure, and social resilience. My research focuses on two interrelated areas: human movement perturbation under the influence of natural and manmade disasters (collaborating with Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech), and geosocial networks in big cities (collaborating with Harvard University). The study of New Yorkers' mobility during Hurricane Sandy is reported by CityLab, from The Atlantic.

Before joining in Northeastern, I was a postdoc fellow at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University. There, I found my research interests in studying social inequality and segregation using the "big data" from Twitter by working with Prof. Robert Sampson and Mario Small. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. My advisor was Prof. John Taylor, director of the Network Dynamics lab. During my time at Virginia Tech, I was also the first Ph.D. Fellow at BioBuild, an interdisciplinary program, and a Via Teaching Fellow. I obtained my M.S. in Construction Management from Michigan State University and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University (China).

Lee Breckenridge

Professor of Law

Professor Breckenridge specializes in environmental and natural resources law. She began her career as an attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, where she worked on some of the agency's initial regulatory efforts to implement the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Professor Breckenridge continued her environmental work as an assistant attorney general with the state of Tennessee and the commonwealth of Massachusetts. She served as a law clerk for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1977-1978.

Before joining the faculty of the School of Law, Professor Breckenridge was chief of the Environmental Protection Division for the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, where she was engaged in a wide range of litigation to enforce the requirements of federal and state air and water pollution statutes, hazardous waste management requirements, and wetlands and tidelands protection laws.

At Northeastern, Professor Breckenridge teaches courses in environmental law, wildlife and ecosystems law, land use zoning and planning law, and property. She also works with students on independent study projects focusing on a variety of related topics, such as urban environmental justice, affordable housing and federal lands management. In her research and advocacy work, she has a particular interest in aquatic ecosystems and in the evolution of property and regulatory systems to manage conflicts over water flow and quality. As a member of the board of directors of the Charles River Watershed Association and a participant in other government task forces, she has advocated for new policies and regulations to manage urban infrastructure and land uses in order to maintain adequate water quality and instream water flows in rivers and streams.

Ambika Bajpayee

Prof. Bajpayee works on drug delivery to connective and charged tissues such as cartilage, meniscus, intervertebral disc and mucosal membranes. Her lab utilizes concepts of nanomedicine and bio-electrostatics to design polypeptides and protein-based carriers for targeted and sustained delivery of small molecule drugs, protein growth factors, antibodies and genetic materials to specific intra-tissue and intra-cellular target sites inside connective tissues.

A main focus is on using charge interactions and other binding mechanisms to rationally design drug carriers that can penetrate through the dense matrix of avascular, negatively charged tissues. Her lab is also interested in understanding mechanisms leading to degenerative joint diseases (e.g., osteoarthritis) due to ageing and traumatic injuries. The group strives to combine basic science with translational research to develop biomedical technologies.

Nada Sanders

Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management

Dr. Sanders is an internationally recognized expert in forecasting, predictive analytics, risk management, and supply chain management. Her research includes identifying best practices in forecasting, developing a corporate technology strategy, and creating a resilient supply chain. Her teaching includes advanced supply chain management problems, supply chain strategy, supply chain analytics, and forecasting. She has taught at a wide range of academic levels, primarily at the MBA and Executive MBA levels, and has designed multiple successful MBA programs.

Dr. Sanders has held a range of leadership roles in both academic and professional organizations and has served on numerous Executive Boards. She has provided training and consulting to a range of Fortune 500 companies, including IDG, Nike, AT&T, CIBA Corning, Mattel, MTC Corp., Dell, and many others. She is a frequently called upon keynote speaker and expert witness having worked with firms such as Jones Day; Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease; Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP and others.

Peter Boynton

CEO, Kostas Research Institute and Northeastern University Professor of the Practice, CSSH

Peter Boynton is CEO of the Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security and Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University. Boynton is a homeland security practitioner who was previously Commissioner of Emergency Management and Homeland Security for the state of Connecticut, an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, a Federal Security Director for TSA, and Director on the White House National Security Council staff. He holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, an engineering degree from the Coast Guard Academy, and an unlimited Master’s License for ocean-going vessels of any tonnage.

Ravi Sundaram

Professor, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

Ravi Sundaram’s primary research interests lie in networks and algorithms. He is interested in network performance and approximation algorithms for the design and efficient utilization of networks. He enjoys devising efficient schemes for improving the performance of network based applications and validating their use through innovative systems implementations. He is also interested in network security and game theoretic aspects of network usage. In the past he has worked in complexity theory and combinatorics.

Professor Sundaram joined Northeastern in the fall of 2003 after working as the Director of Engineering at Akamai Technologies, where he played a critical role in the buildout of the world’s leading content delivery network. There he also established the mapping group which is responsible for directing browser requests (over 10 billion/day) to the optimal Akamai server.

Matthias Ruth

Director, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Professor of Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering

Director, MS Urban Informatics

Matthias Ruth, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, is a professor of public policy and urban affairs and civil and environmental engineering. Prior to Northeastern, Professor Ruth was at the University of Maryland where he was the Roy F. Weston Chair in Natural Economics, director of the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the Division of Research, director of the Environmental Policy Program at the School of Public Policy, and co-director of the Engineering and Public Policy Program.

His research focuses on dynamic modeling of natural resource use, industrial and infrastructure systems analysis, and environmental economics and policy. His theoretical work heavily draws on concepts from engineering, economics and ecology, while his applied research utilizes methods of non-linear dynamic modeling as well as adaptive and anticipatory management. Applications of his work cover the full spectrum from local to regional, to national and global environmental challenges, as well as the investment and policy opportunities these challenges present.

Professor Ruth has published 12 books and over 120 papers and book chapters in the scientific literature. He is a founder of Ecological Economics, serves on the boards of numerous journals and scientific organizations, is a founding co-editor in chief of the international science journal Urban Climate, and collaborates extensively with scientists and policy makers worldwide. Recent publications include Distributional Impacts of Climate Change: Social and Economic Implications and Dynamic Modeling of Diseases and Pest.

Ruth’s research has been supported by government agencies and private sources including: the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Organization, Natural Resources Defense Council, Research Council of Norway, German Ministry of Science, Education and Technology and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Department of the Environment, and Environmental Defense. Ruth earned his PhD in geography from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Auroop Ganguly

Auroop R. Ganguly directs the Sustainability & Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab) at Northeastern University, where his research encompasses weather extremes, water sustainability and marine or urban ecology under climate change as well as the resilience of critical infrastructures and lifelines under natural or man-made hazards. He has developed and adapted computational solutions, especially in so-called "Big Data", to solve problems in sustainability, security and business. His research in climate, hydrology and ecology has been accepted and published in interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, PNAS, Scientific Reports, as well as the top disciplinary journals in hydrology, geophysics, and climate, and highlighted by scientific venues and by the national and international media. He has published and received best papers awards in top peer-reviewed computer science conferences or journals in the area of data mining and machine learning, as well as network sciences. In addition, he has published in information technology and sciences, with a particular focus on business intelligence and the supply chain. He has edited books on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data and has contributed to editorial, committee and workshop organizational service in civil engineering, geophysics, meteorology, operational research, electrical engineering and computer science societies. He has collaborated and published with a wide set of interdisciplinary researchers including in atmospheric and marine sciences, computer and network sciences, statistics, management sciences as well as law, economics and policy.

Prior to joining Northeastern University in Fall 2011, he had 7 years experience at the US DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, most recently as a Senior Scientist, in their Computational Sciences and Engineering division and the Climate Change Science Initiative in areas such as climate change, weather extremes, hydrology, geographic information science, critical infrastructures risk, sensor data mining, transportation and homeland security and defense. He was employed in product development and senior product management roles for about 5 years at Oracle Corporation in their time series database group and then in their supply chain e-business applications suite, followed by about a year at a startup, which in turn was subsequently acquired by Oracle Corporation. Ganguly has taught undergraduate courses in probability, engineering economy and climate change science and policy, in addition to graduate courses in applied time series and spatial statistics, critical infrastructures resilience and water resources, across three universities, namely, Northeastern University as a full time faculty, as well as Tennessee Knoxville and South Florida in joint faculty or visiting faculty roles, over the last 12 years.

Amy Farrell

Associate Director and Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Professor Farrell joined the tenure track faculty in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2008. Prior to that time she served as the assistant director of the Institute on Race and Justice and a faculty researcher at Northeastern University. Her research seeks to understand arrest, adjudication and criminal case disposition practices. Professor Farrell is the co-author of Not Guilty: Are the Acquitted Innocent, published by New York University Press in 2012 (with Daniel Givelber) and co-editor of Deadly injustice: Trayvon Martin, race, and the criminal justice system published by New York University Press, 2015 (with Devon Johnson and Patricia Warren).

Professor Farrell’s research seeks to understanding how the criminal justice system responds to newly recognized and prioritized crimes such as hate crimes and human trafficking. Professor Farrell collaborated on research examining challenges to police identification and reporting of hate crimes. Professor Farrell co-authored a report for the National Institute of Justice on hate crimes against immigrants in the U.S. and is currently conducting research on youth and Latino/a experiences of bias motivated crime victimization. She oversees a program to collect data on human trafficking investigations for the U.S. Department of Justice and has studied and published research about how local, state and federal law enforcement agencies identify, investigate and prosecute human trafficking cases. She recently completed projects examining labor trafficking victimization in the US and assign the effectiveness of state anti-trafficking law reform efforts.

Professor Farrell has testified about police identification of human trafficking before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. She was also appointed to the Massachusetts Attorneys General Human Trafficking Policy Task Force and oversaw a committee that developed recommendations for improving the collection and sharing of data on human trafficking victims in the Commonwealth. Professor Farrell was a co-recipient of NIJ’s W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship on crime justice and culture in 2006 and the American Society Criminology Mentor of the Year Awardee in 2014.

Berna Turam

Professor of Sociology and International Affairs

Berna Turam, the Director of International Affairs, is a professor of sociology at Northeastern University. She has an abiding interest in conducting research on state-society interaction, particularly on the interaction between ordinary Muslim people and the state. Her most recent work explored the interplay between the government and contested urban space. Her ethnography in Istanbul and Berlin revealed and analyzed the ways in which contested urban space generated democratic practices and freedoms that facilitate inclusion and democratic accommodation.

By gendering political and spatial processes of inclusion and exclusion, she also does intersectional analysis of religion, space and gender. She is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2015) and the editor of Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) In addition, she published articles in journals including British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Nations and Nationalism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Contemporary Islam and Journal of Democracy. She co-edited a special issue, entitled “Secular Muslims?” in Comparative Studies of South America, Africa and the Middle East. Her article, entitled “Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Space, Power and Freedom in an Istanbul neighborhood,” won the best article award from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2013.

Over the course of 2016, she was awarded two fellowships at London School of Economics and at Cosmopolis Department of Geography at Vrije University in Brussels. Currently, Turam serves on the advisory board of the project entitled “Understanding the Perceptions of Science in Muslim Societies.” She is also the Co-PI of a newly funded collaborative project on sanctuary cities and safe places.

Sanjeev Mukerjee

College Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Northeastern University

Dr. Sanjeev Mukerjee is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (Northeastern University); where he has been since September of 1998. He also heads the newly created center for Renewable Energy Technology at Northeastern University and its subset the Laboratory for Electrochemical Advanced Power (LEAP). This center aims at enhancing education and research on all aspects of renewable energy and green chemistry with special emphasis on selective charge transfer at electrochemical and photo-electrochemical interfaces.

His research on charge transfer dynamics at both two- and three-dimensional electrochemical interfaces encompasses materials development, in situ synchrotron spectroscopy and electro-analytical methods. In addition, new computational initiatives are in progress involving both molecular modeling and simulation of multiple electron scattering in the context of in situ synchrotron XANES method. Peer reviewed publication currently number 150, with an H-factor of 59.

The current projects in the group include materials development for new electrocatalysts, polymer electrolyte membranes and high energy density (and capacity) cathode materials for aqueous and non-aqueous storage cells. Fundamental understanding of structure property relationships is in concert with applications. Among the seminal contributions are, the first demonstration of the power of true element specific in situ x-ray methods for understanding electrocatalysis and intercalation using synchrotron techniques of x-ray scattering and absorption.

Christie Rizzo

Associate Professor of Applied Psychology

Christie J. Rizzo, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Southern California. She completed her internship in Clinical Psychology at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School and her postdoctoral fellowship in Clinical Psychology at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies (CAAS) at Brown University. Dr. Rizzo was previously the Assistant Director of the Juvenile Mental Health Clinic at the Rhode Island Family Court. Dr. Rizzo’s research focuses on the development and implementation of evidence-based, violence and risk behavior prevention programming for youth, including technology-based initiatives. Her prevention work centers around the use of skills-based approaches to both reduce risk and promote resilience among our most vulnerable youth including those involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Taskin Padir

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University

Taskin Padir is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a courtesy appointment at CCIS, at Northeastern University. He received his PhD and MS degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. He holds a BS in electrical and electronics engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.

He is the Director of Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Laboratory (RIVeR Lab). His projects have been sponsored by NSF, NASA, DARPA, AFRL, and many industry partners. Professor Padir led project teams for the NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge, SmartAmerica Challenge and the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Professor Padir presented at the Innovation on the Edge: Accelerating Solutions in the Fight Against Ebola event hosted by OSTP and USAID at the White House in 2015 and organized and hosted OSTP/NRI Workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers in 2014. A team led by Padir was recently selected to receive one of NASA’s humanoid robot Valkyrie for research and development.

Ali Abur

Professor

Ali Abur obtained his B.S. degree from Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi, Turkey in 1979 and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ohio State University in 1981 and 1985 respectively. He was a faculty member at Texas A&M University until November 2005 when he joined the faculty of Northeastern University as a Professor and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research and educational activities have been in the area of power systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for his work on power system state estimation. He co-authored a book and published widely in IEEE journals and conferences.

Luis Dau

Luis Dau is an Associate Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern's D’Amore-McKim School of Business and an Associate Fellow at the Center for Emerging Markets. His research and teaching interests include global strategy, emerging market firms, institutional changes, pro-market reforms, business groups, family firms, firm performance, international corporate social responsibility, sustainability, formal and informal entrepreneurship, and culture.

Dau received his PhD in International Business/Strategy from the University of South Carolina. He was named a John H. Dunning Visiting Fellow for the 2016/17 academic year, hosted by the John H. Dunning Centre for International Business at the Henley Business School, University of Reading.

Cordula Robinson

Associate Teaching Professor

ead faculty for Geospatial Services (GS) in the graduate program at the College of Professional Studies. I completed my Ph.D. at UCL; continued as a postdoc at the (then named) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge MA; as a Junior Scientist at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, Germany; and Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing, where I worked as a Research Associate Professor for over 10 years. My research centered on issues of water scarcity and water security in the MENA region using geospatial innovation. I joined Northeastern full time in Jan 2007, continuing this research alongside 2 Fulbright scholars. Current research focuses on geospatial intelligence and multidisciplinary geospatial, particularly deriving actionable insights from big geospatial datasets to support community resilience in response to complex challenges. In 2014 and 2015, I earned USGIF accreditation and the NGA-USGS Geospatial Center of Excellence Designation for the GS program.

Edmund Yeh

Edmund Yeh received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering with Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 1994. He then studied at Cambridge University on the Winston Churchill Scholarship, obtaining his M.Phil in Engineering in 1995. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT under Professor Robert Gallager in 2001. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. He was previously Assistant and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Statistics at Yale University.

Professor Yeh has held visiting positions at MIT, Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and Technical University of Munich. He has been on the technical staff at the Mathematical Sciences Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Signal Processing Research Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Space and Communications Group, Hughes Electronics Corporation. Professor Yeh is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, the Winston Churchill Scholarship, the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowships, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award, and the President’s Award for Academic Excellence (Stanford University). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received Best Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), London, UK, June 2015, and at the IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN), Phuket, Thailand, July 2012.

Professor Yeh has served as the Secretary of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.

Brooke Foucault Welles

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies

Brooke Foucault Welles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and a core faculty member of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Combining the methods of computational social science and network science with the theories of communication studies, Foucault Welles studies how online communication networks generate social support and build resilience in individuals, teams, and communities.

Much of her work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, with co-authors from computer science, political science, digital humanities, design, and public health. Her recent contributions include a series of studies of the transformative power of networked counterpublics, where she argues that online communication networks uniquely enable members of marginalized communities to support one another and advocate for social change. Foucault Welles' methodological contributions include techniques for the longitudinal analysis of communication networks using event-based network analysis, and guidelines for the effective use of network visualizations in scientific and lay publications. She has also contributed a number of critical pieces about computational methods and is currently co-editing a book on computational communication research entitled Communication in the Networked Age.

Foucault Welles’ research is funded by grants from the US Army Research Office and US Army Research Lab, and has been featured in leading social science journals such as the Journal of Communication, Information, Communication and Society, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Web Science and was on the organizing board of the 2016 International Conference on Computational Social Science and the Web Science Track of the 2015 World Wide Web conference. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Communication at Northwestern University and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Communication from Cornell University.

Daniel Aldrich

Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Director, Masters Program in Security and Resilience, Northeastern University

Daniel P. Aldrich is professor and director of the Security and Resilience Program at Northeastern University. He has published four books, more than 40 peer reviewed articles, and written op-eds for The New York Times, CNN, Asahi Shinbun, along with appearing on popular media outlets such as CNBC, MSNBC, NPR, and HuffPost. His research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the Abe Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and he has carried out more than five years of fieldwork in Japan, India, Africa, and the Gulf Coast.

Martha Davis

Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Experiential Education

Professor Davis teaches Constitutional Law, US Human Rights Advocacy and Professional Responsibility. She is a faculty director for the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and the NuLawLab. In 2015-2016, she held the Fulbright distinguished chair in human rights and humanitarian law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Lund University, in Lund, Sweden, and she remains an affiliated scholar with the institute. She is also a member of the expert pool for WaterLex, a Geneva-based development organization that advocates for water and human rights.

Professor Davis has written widely on human rights, women’s rights, and social justice issues. She is co-author of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights: Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West 2014) and she co-edited Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work chronicling the US human rights movement. In 2008, Bringing Human Rights Home was named one of the “best books in the field of human rights” by the US Human Rights Network. Professor Davis’s book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition.

Professor Davis’ articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the North Carolina Law Review, Fordham Law Review and many others. Her most recent book is Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities, in which she and her co-editors bring together academics and practitioners at the forefront of human rights cities and the “right to the city” movement to critically discuss the potential that human rights cities hold for global urban justice.

In addition to serving as an editor, Professor Davis contributed a chapter, “Cities, Human Rights and Accountability: The United States Experience.” Professor Davis co-edits the Law Professors’ Network Human Rights at Home blog. Prior to joining the law faculty in 2002, Professor Davis was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a women’s rights practitioner, she was counsel in a number of cases before the US Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that Professor Davis argued before the court.

Professor Davis has also served as a fellow at the Bunting Institute, as the first Kate Stoneman Visiting Professor of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School, a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellow, a fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School and fellow of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Professor Davis is an appointed member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights

Ozlem Ergun

Dr. Özlem Ergun was the Coca-Cola Associate Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology until August 2014 when she joined Northeastern University. She has also a co-founded and co-directed the Health and Humanitarian Systems Research Center at the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. She received a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.

Dr. Özlem Ergun’s research focuses on the design and management of large-scale networks. She has applied her work on network design, management and collaboration to problems arising in the airline, ocean cargo and trucking industries. Recently, Dr. Ergun’s work has been focused on the use of systems thinking and mathematical modeling in applications with societal impact. She has worked with organizations that respond to humanitarian crisis around the world, including: UN WFP, UNHCR, IFRC, CARE USA, FEMA, USACE, CDC, AFCEMA, and MedShare International.

Ryan Ellis

Ryan Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern. Ryan’s research and teaching focuses on topics related to communication law and policy, infrastructure politics, and cybersecurity. Prior to joining the Department, Ryan held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego.

Steven Scyphers

Assistant Professor, Department of Marine & Environmental Sciences

Steven Scyphers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. Prior to his current position, Steven was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern and was awarded a Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

After earning a BS in Marine Biology at Auburn University, he completed his PhD at the University of South Alabama and Dauphin Island Sea Lab. Steven’s research integrates ecology and sociology to understand and develop strategies to overcome major challenges facing coastal communities. This work has included projects on sustainable shoreline development, coastal fisheries, ecosystem restoration, and mitigating the impacts of disasters.

Max Abrahms

Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy

Dr. Max Abrahms’ research focus is international security, especially terrorism. He is assistant professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University, a member at the Council on Foreign Relations, a faculty fellow at India's Observer Research Foundation, and an editorial board member on the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.

Abrahms has published in many journals such as International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, and Harvard Business Review. Abrahms is also a frequent terrorism analyst in the media, especially on the consequences of terrorism, its motives, and the implications for counterterrorism strategy.

Previously, he has been awarded fellowships and financial backing from the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University and Stanford University, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy, George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the economics department at Bar Ilan University, the political science department at Johns Hopkins University, and the Belfer Center at Harvard University.

Jerome Hajjar

Jerome F. Hajjar is the CDM Smith Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He is also the Director of the Laboratory for Structural Testing of Resilient and Sustainable Systems (STReSS Laboratory). He has served as Chair of the Structures Faculty and as Deputy Director of the NSF Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a Professor and Narbey Khachaturian Faculty Scholar from 2005-2010. His research and teaching interests include analysis, experimental testing, and design of steel and composite steel/concrete building and bridge structures, regional modeling and assessment of infrastructure systems, and earthquake engineering, and he has published over 200 papers and edited three books on these topics.

Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he was a Professor at the University of Minnesota since 1992. He has also served as the Information Technology Director for the NSF George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) experimental testing facilities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Dr. Hajjar was a structural engineer and associate at the architectural/engineering firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in their Chicago and New York offices.

Dr. Hajjar serves on the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) Committee on Specifications and several of its task committees, including chairing Task Committee 5 on Composite Construction. He is the past chair of AISC Task Committee 3 on Loads, Analysis, and Systems and AISC Subcommittee 6 on Composite Construction for AISC Task Committee 9 on Seismic Design, and he led the editing of the AISC Commentary for the 2005 AISC Specification.

Justin Crane

Assistant Professor of Biology

Dr. Crane is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Northeastern University. In 2013, Dr. Crane obtained his PhD in Aging and Cellular Metabolism from McMaster University in Canada. In 2015, he completed his post-doctoral involving Obesity and Diabetes research, also at McMaster University. He was then recruited to Northeastern University under their Healthy Aging Initiative, joining several faculty that study aging and regenerative biology. Dr. Crane studies fundamental cellular mechanisms of aging in mammalian cells and tissues, with a focus on skin, connective and muscle tissue. Dr. Crane is a member of Northeastern’s Biology PhD program.

Carlos Cuevas

Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Professor Cuevas received his BA from Tufts University and his PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University in San Diego, CA. He is currently co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Laboratory. Professor Cuevas’s research interests are in the area of victimization and trauma, sexual violence and sexual offending, family violence, and psychological assessment. Specifically, his work focuses examining victimization among Latinos and how it relates to psychological distress and service utilization, as well as the role cultural factors play on victimization.

In addition, he is studying the impact of psychological factors on the revictimization of children and how it helps explain the connection between victimization and delinquency. His most recent National Institute of Justice-funded research will examine the scope and impact of bias crime against Latinos. Other NIJ-funded collaborations include the development of instruments to evaluate bias victimization among youth and teen dating aggression. Professor Cuevas also continues to engage in clinical work, providing assessment and treatment to victims of abuse and trauma as well as sex offenders.

Laura Kuhl

Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and International Affairs

Laura Kuhl is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the International Affairs Program. Her research examines climate adaptation and resilience in developing countries. Prior to Northeastern, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School, where she helped establish a new research partnership with the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) on climate policy in developing countries. She has studied innovation, technology transfer and adoption for adaptation as well as mainstreaming adaptation in development policy in East Africa and Central America. Current projects also address climate information and early warning systems, coastal resilience and national adaptation plans. She has conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia, Honduras, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and New England and has collaborated with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and UNDP. She has a PhD and MALD in International Affairs from the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a BA in Environmental Studies and Anthropology from Middlebury College.

Devesh Tiwari

Devesh's research focus on developing novel computational analytical tools and models toward designing resilient, sustainable, and scalable systems. His research interest also involves applying resilience, high performance computing, and data analytics expertise to emerging inter-disciplinary research domains. The long-term, overarching goal of his research is to increase the sustainability and resilience of complex infrastructure including data-center-scale computing systems, health care industry, medical devices, transportation systems, power-grid infrastructures, and communication systems.

His research publications have received best paper award nominations at top resilience and high performance computing systems conferences including Supercomputing (SC), Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), and Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). His work has appeared in various conferences such as USENIX FAST, SC, DSN, HPCA, MICRO, IPDPS, and have been covered by the news media including Slashdot and HPCWire.

Before joining Northeastern, Devesh was a staff scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a flagship multiprogram science and technology national laboratory of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). Devesh earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. Before that, he obtained his B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in India.

Northeastern Invests In Resilience Research

Through a competitive review process, the Global Resilience Institute has awarded seed-funding to teams of Northeastern faculty, for resilience-related research collaborations. This funding supports innovative, collaborative cross-college research proposals.